I wasn’t the only one. From the moment that André shot that ball toward her, a dimension was added to the relationship between the five of us—that of jealousy. It is desire that tolerates no rivals, a life-and-death struggle of untameable instincts. Each of us poured it into his own mould: André, Joost, and I into that of yearning and desire, while David tried to keep control by assuming his stoical attitude, and actually Peter seemed to be the only one to withdraw from the fray. And then there were those other insufferable assholes who were always hanging around her.
With great love comes fear, the fear that the object will remain eternally unattainable, and should that prove not to be the case, the eternal fear of losing her. That does strange things to you.
Laura joined our group from the day she walked into the swimming pool. It was as if she had come especially to the pool to meet us. Our quintet became a sextet, a special group of five guys and a beautiful girl, the siren of a tightly knit band.
We didn’t go to her place. I went into Joost or André’s living room as naturally as our own, and I plundered David’s parents’ fridge without problems. The Sweet Lady Jane was common ground, although Madame Olga grumbled.
But we never went to Laura’s, even though she lived near André and me. ‘My parents prefer not,’ she said. Probably her parents were not even aware of our existence. She didn’t tell us how she managed to get away in the evenings when we went out, or to come swimming or skating or just hanging around with us on Saturdays.
When you saw her father and mother walking next to each other on Sunday morning on their way to their little church, you would never have imagined that they had a perfect daughter. The girl was so different from her parents that she must have been adopted or exchanged in the cradle.
Cor van Bemmel was a bookkeeper at Van Deutekom’s brickworks, just outside town. He had a funny walk. It was as if his left leg kept getting the signals from his brain a fraction late. Laura’s mother, small and rotund, always walked obliquely behind him, as if ready to catch him if he were to fall backward. The look in their eyes betrayed nothing of what was going on inside them, except that all cheerfulness was banished. They spoke to other people only when there was no alternative. According to Laura, they lived in virtual silence at home, too.
Laura’s parents belonged to a small religious community that met twice every Sunday in an unobtrusive building in the Kuiperstraat. Laura had not gone to services there since she was 13. She didn’t want to talk about what that had meant for her relationship with her parents. ‘They can’t beat faith into you,’ she said. I suspected that Cor van Bemmel had tried.
Once, on the boat with Peter, after we had watched a film about a boy who had been brought up among the Amish, she said a little more about it. ‘Suddenly I was so full of guilt, it overflowed. Having it drummed into you every Sunday how bad and rotten you are, at a certain moment you’ve had enough.’ She said she did not understand why she always had to ask for forgiveness. And then, without any further explanation: ‘It’s as if you’re growing up in a concentration camp where you’re allowed to think only one thing, and if you don’t, you’re threatened with eternal damnation.’
‘Brainwashed,’ said Peter.
The rivalry crept up on us and was not explicit. It would not have struck an outsider, but I noticed it from casual sentences and glances, sideswipes that were never dished out before, little digs. Suddenly someone underlined another person’s weakness; the laughter at a stupid remark sounded just a little different. Suddenly André was wearing different trousers from his worn-out jeans, and Joost had bought Spanish riding boots after Laura had once let slip that she thought they were cool. Something happened to the loyalty between the five of us—it was no longer as absolute and it was replaced by distrust.
David did not take part in all the macho behaviour and tried to keep us together. He saw before we did how jealousy would drive us apart—and he did his best to stop it. ‘You lot are horny apes,’ he said. ‘Eager beavers.’ David already knew that everything we call romantic is, in fact, the destroyer of romanticism, or in any case of unselfish boyhood romanticism.
‘So you wouldn’t like to fuck her?’ said Joost. David shrugged his shoulders in irritation. ‘You don’t say you’d like to screw André, do you?’ he said. ‘You don’t talk like that about your friends.’
‘But I don’t want to,’ said Joost. ‘That’s the difference between women and friends.’
Laura knew what her effect on us was, but at the beginning she showed no sign of favouritism, as if she knew that that would mean the immediate end of her place in our group. She balanced like a ballerina on pointe and divided her attention between the five of us as if she were keeping an account in which she maintained an accurate record of the distribution of her sympathy.
I don’t know exactly what it was about us that attracted her. Perhaps it was our closeness that gave her a safe feeling; perhaps together we formed a protective wall against everything she had grown up with. Together, we were sensitive, well read, intelligent, funny, and sporty. Peter quoted from world literature, André was the star player on his local football team, Joost could explain relativity theory or point out the constellations in the sky. You played him ten seconds of a saxophone solo and he knew who it was. David was the understanding listener who never interrupted you or brought up his own worries. But with every day that she was with us, every word that she spoke, every look, and every touch, it became clearer that this ménage à six could not last forever.
She was a year younger than us, born on 21 April 1965. The reason that she was in our class was because she had skipped a year. She was better than us in almost all subjects—perhaps Joost had a little more scientific precision, but she could sometimes amaze even him with the speed at which she got to the bottom of mathematical problems.
Her great love was poetry in English, and Emily Dickinson in particular. And she loved the plays of Ionesco and Pinter. In the fifth year, we performed Pinter’s Birthday Party. Joost was Stanley, the main part; André and I played Goldberg and McCann. Our acting talent was sadly wanting, and the fact that the performance was a great success was due entirely to her role as director.
Quite soon, something grew between Laura and Peter that was different from the relationship André, Joost, David, and I had with her. Peter had found a soulmate. From the beginning, Laura clearly felt a deep admiration for Peter’s talent. She was fascinated by what she immediately recognized as something exceptional. We also saw that Peter could do things we couldn’t cope with, but when he became too airy-fairy, we could just as easily put him down as a facile versifier-to-order.
When Peter and Laura talked about poems, they were way above our heads. We didn’t mind, and when we had had enough, we said so. Joost, in particular, didn’t beat about the bush. ‘Crooner and Swooner’, he once called them.
Peter gave a new poem to her to read first. He handed it to her and followed her eye movements as she read it. Then he hung on her every word as she gave her judgement. Usually she thought for a moment, then came out with a review you could have put straight in the paper. All the references, all the images, all the associations—she combined them all into an opinion that was, by the way, invariably positive, with occasional suggestions for a slight improvement or adjustment. Peter always accepted them, at least at first.
‘Sometimes she finds something that I haven’t consciously put in myself at all,’ he said. ‘That happens a lot with poems, of course. My father also interprets for all he’s worth. Sometimes he creases me up with all the things he reads into it. But with her, there’s something strange going on. It’s not her interpretations, it’s my encoding that she unravels. She tells me why I’ve written things